The Woman Who Smashed Codes

by Jason Fagone

powerful men started telling the story, they left her out of it. In 1945, Elizebeth’s spy files were stamped with classification tags and entombed in government archives, and officials made her swear an oath of secrecy about her work in the war. So she had to sit silent and

watch others seize credit for her accomplishments, particularly J. Edgar Hoover. A gifted salesman, Hoover successfully portrayed the FBI as the major hero in the Nazi spy hunt. Public gratitude flowed to Hoover, increasing his already considerable power, making him an American icon, virtually untouchable until his death in 1972. It’s not quite true that history is written by the winners. It’s written by the best publicists on the winning team. What follows is my attempt to put back together a puzzle that was fragmented

poetry and philosophy, two methods of exploring the unknown, two scalpels for carving up fact and thought. She studied the works of Shakespeare and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, carrying books of their poems and plays around campus, annotating and underlining the pages

person who had died had “passed away” or that a staggering drunk at a party was “a bit indisposed.” It was more important to be honest. “We glide over the offensiveness of names and

calm down our consciences by eulogistic mellifluous terms, until our very moral senses are dulled,” she wrote. “Let things be shown, let them come forth in their real colors, and humanity will not be so prone to a sin which is glossed over by a dainty public!” Sometimes Elizebeth had trouble channeling these energies and frustrations

been born a man.” Wanting something more, and ready to take a risk, Elizebeth quit her job at the Indiana high school in the spring of 1916 and moved back in with her parents to think about what was next. She soon remembered how unpleasant it was to live with her father. She reached her

anonymous. After a week she decided to return home. Before boarding the train, though, she wanted to make one more stop in the city, at a place she had heard about, the Newberry Library, which owned a rare copy of the First Folio of William Shakespeare, a book whose backstory had intrigued her when she learned it in college. The Bard’s plays were never collected and printed in one place

Simply publishing the book was a radical act, a statement that the phrases of a playwright deserved to be documented with the same care as the Gospels. A team of London artisans produced about a thousand copies, each typeset and bound by hand. Five men memorized portions of the plays to help them set type faster, stacking metal letters one by one into words and sentences. Over the centuries,

The library was an odd institution, created by a dead man’s will and a quirk of fate. A rich merchant named Walter Newberry died on a steamship in 1868. The crew preserved his body for the remainder of the voyage in an empty rum cask before returning it to his beloved city, where lawyers discovered that Newberry had left behind almost $2,150,000 for the construction of a public library. According

This was the same insecurity that drove the fathers of Chicago to raise the dreamlike White City, the temporary pavilions of the Chicago World’s Fair that soared along the southern edge of the lake in the summer of 1893. The White City exhibited the future in prototype, pieces of an unfinished puzzle. On August 26, 1893, a day of demonstrations at the Palace of Mechanical Arts, a building twice as large as the U.S. Capitol, the palace rumbled and whirred with machines

completed construction of the Newberry Library, ten miles north of the noisy fairgrounds, and the first patrons entered the library in reverent silence.

designed as “a select affair” for “the better and cleaner classes,” the Chicago Times wrote with approval when the Newberry first opened. It was an imposing five-story building of tan granite blocks. All visitors had to fill out a slip stating the purpose of their research and they were turned away if they could not specify a topic. The books, available for reference only, were shelved in reading rooms modeled after the home libraries of wealthy gentlemen, cozy and intimate spaces

the original printing of Shakespeare’s plays. This is the book that Elizebeth Smith was determined to see in June 1916, when she was twenty-three. Opening

librarians, a young woman, must have noticed the expression of entrancement on her face, because now she walked over to Elizebeth and asked if she was interested in Shakespeare. They

Fabyan. She pronounced the name with a long a, like “Faybe-yin.” Elizebeth had never heard the name, so the librarian explained. George Fabyan was a wealthy Chicago businessman who often visited the library to examine the First Folio. He said he believed the book contained secret messages written in cipher, and he had made it known that he wished to hire an assistant, preferably a “young, personable, attractive college graduate who knew English literature,” to further this research. Would Elizebeth be interested in a position like that? Elizebeth

She followed him toward a Union Pacific car. Fabyan and Elizebeth climbed aboard at the back end. Fabyan walked her all the way to the front of the car and told her to sit in the frontmost seat, by the window. Then he went galumphing back through the car saying hello to the other passengers, seeming to recognize several, gossiping with them about this and that, and joking with the conductor in a matey

enough circumstances to be wary of the rich and their power. Then Fabyan did something she would remember all her life. He rocked forward, jabbed his reddened face to within inches of hers,

fixed his blue eyes on her hazel ones, and thundered, loud enough for everyone in the car to hear, “Well, WHAT IN HELL DO YOU KNOW?” Elizebeth

Hamlet, he said. Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, the sonnets—the most famous written works in the world. Countless millions had read them, quoted them, memorized them, performed them, used pieces of them in everyday speech without even knowing. Yet all those readers had missed something. A hidden order, a secret of indescribable magnitude. Out

First Folio, he continued. The Shakespeare book at the Newberry Library. It wasn’t what it seemed. The words on the page, which appeared to be describing the wounds and treacheries

lovers and kings, in fact told a completely different story, a secret story, using an ingenious system of secret writing. The messages revealed that the author of the plays was not William Shakespeare. The true author, and the man who had concealed the messages, was in fact Francis Bacon, the pioneering scientist and philosopher-king of Elizabethan England. Elizebeth

To Elizebeth’s amazement, a limousine was waiting for her at Geneva Station—not the one she’d ridden in an hour ago in Chicago but a second limousine with a second chauffeur. She climbed in with Fabyan and was carried south along a local road known as the Lincoln Highway for a bit more than a mile, until a long, high stone wall appeared to the left. Then a gate. The limousine slowed. It pulled off the highway, to the right, across from

cottage hung a sign that read Fabyan. The story mutated as it passed from teller to teller. The cottage at Riverbank was stocked with attractive women, kept by Fabyan to satisfy his lust. They had been seen disrobing. Five women, ten. Rumors

They heard loud noises from the direction of the estate, things that sounded like bombs exploding. They saw what looked like warplanes buzzing around the buildings and making an incredible racket. The press often called him “Colonel Fabyan” or simply “The Colonel.” It seemed obvious that Fabyan was performing military

America. George used his gift for salesmanship to grow the company. After a Bliss Fabyan textile mill in Maine started making a type of striped seersucker cloth, he christened it “Ripplette,” a wonder fabric that required no ironing and resisted stain, undyed white bedspreads staying white after repeated washings, “white and clear as the driven snow . . . the name ‘Ripplette’ on a bedspread is the only sure indication of Ripplette quality. . . .” Fabyan

William Randolph Hearst would soon build a 165-room castle in California full of marble statues. Fabyan was thinking bigger. “Some rich men go in for art collections, gay times

the Riviera, or extravagant living, but they all get satiated,” he said. “That’s why I stick to scientific experiments, spending money to discover valuable things that universities can’t afford. You can never get sick of too much knowledge.” The atom had not been split in 1916. The structure of DNA was undescribed.

of science. There seemed to be experiments happening everywhere, even inside his own house, known as the Villa. A man from the Chicago Herald was shocked to notice a swarm of bees flying through the Villa’s open window. Fabyan laughed. “Those bees are just going into the music room to deposit their honey,” he said. “You see I didn’t trust that particular bunch of bees, so I had their hive placed inside the [Villa] and had it glassed in so we could watch them and see that they didn’t cheat. . . . It’s made honest bees out of them—this constant

“Yes,” Fabyan continued, “a community of thinkers.” He took the reporter to the farm and explained how his scientists were taking cows and pigs and sheep and freezing them with rocks of ice and then slicing them thin as salami, to study their anatomy; he showed off the statues of the duck and the Egyptian thrones next to the Villa and pointed out with glee that they weren’t made of marble or stone but of concrete, which lasts longer than stone and can be carved like stone; he pointed to the Dutch windmill and bragged that it was fully functional, that he used the mill to grind flour and bake fresh loaves

“What for? Why, look at the average human being. A mighty pitiful contraption of flesh and bones. If we of the Riverbank community can improve the human race by experimenting first with flowers and plants—say, won’t that be a wonderful thing?” Some experiments veered into ethically dubious territory. A journalist visiting

walk. I am trying to improve the human race, to discover what’s wrong with the female figure. What will the next generation be like if all the women have hollow chests?” The Philadelphia reporter also revealed that “in his effort to impress

Riverbank, but the aura of mystique at Riverbank was so thick, the range of scientific experiments so wide, that even a trained skeptic like Lescarboura could not necessarily distinguish between the real and the fantastic. “Every so often the world reaches a point bordering on stagnation,

with learning. Her name, she said, was Mrs. Elizabeth Wells Gallup. She ran the Riverbank Cipher School. The other woman was her younger, darker-haired sister, Miss Kate Wells. Young Elizebeth gathered from this brief conversation that Mrs. Gallup and Miss Wells

riding in the limo. She walked through it. A short, curving driveway led down a gentle slope to Fabyan’s personal residence, known as the Villa, a long, low two-story house in a cruciform shape with a heavy roof and thin clapboard siding that seemed to press the house downward

old. Inside the Villa the walls were paneled with squares of dark walnut, and the sun shone through a series of thin slats that Wright’s builders

curving path took her through a Shinto arch of wood and into a pristine garden ringed by buildings, benches, and lanterns of Japanese design. She was told it had all been devised by one of the emperor’s own personal gardeners. Flowering trees were aflame with pink and red

all. She illustrated her explanations with oversize sheets of paper that were curled up like scrolls. She rolled them out to their full length to show Elizebeth, and placed weights on the ends to prevent them from curling up again. The sheets were beautiful and full of hand-drawn letters of the alphabet in subtle variations, lowercase and uppercase,

and the drawings had helped reveal the secrets that Francis Bacon had woven into Shakespeare’s plays. In some way Elizebeth didn’t understand yet, the hidden messages were embedded in the shapes of the letters themselves, in small variations between an f on one page of the Folio and an f on another. According

scientific confirmation and silencing the critics. Then Elizebeth would assist Mrs. Gallup with new investigations. Mrs. Gallup believed that in addition to authoring Shakespeare, Bacon also secretly wrote works commonly attributed to Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and other major figures of the age. Together Elizebeth and Mrs. Gallup would rewrite the history of seventeenth-century England—and by extension, the history of all English literature. George Fabyan popped in briefly, to see how the women were getting

first arrived in the city to look for a job, five thousand women marched toward the Republican National Convention, being held at the Coliseum, to demand the right to vote. The wind and rain shoved the women this way and that by the handles of their increasingly

protesters demanded that the GOP support a constitutional amendment granting women the vote, but after debating the issue, the delegates decided that an amendment would violate “the right of each

When she arrived once again at Riverbank, Fabyan and Mrs. Gallup were glad to see her. They wasted no time, and began teaching her how to dive for what Francis Bacon had left behind: a sunken treasure of words, a ship of gold at the bottom of the sea.

First Folio, “The Names of the Principall Actors.” According to Mrs. Gallup, Francis Bacon had concealed a message on this page. She already knew the secret, but needed to know if Elizebeth could find it, too. Mrs.

theory, enjoyed broad appeal and made a certain sense. Francis Bacon and Shakespeare had lived in the same country in the same era, the England of Queen Elizabeth I, and of the two men, Bacon was by far the more distinguished, a child prodigy who graduated from Trinity College at age fifteen, studied law, served in Parliament, became lord chancellor, won the lofty titles of Baron Verulam and Viscount St. Albans, and wrote manifestoes that heralded the dawn of the scientific age and inspired generations of inventors and revolutionaries. Charles Darwin idolized Francis Bacon; Thomas Jefferson thought

Knowledge is found not in the skull but in contact with Nature. And Bacon made it his mission to collect and classify all forms of knowledge, arguing that if enough knowledge was gathered and sorted and pinned to the page, there was nothing men could not achieve. In an unfinished utopian novel, The New Atlantis, Bacon imagined a lush, remote island ruled by superintelligent scientists. The people

All in all, Bacon was such an impressive person that it seemed perfectly plausible to writers and scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that Bacon might have written Shakespeare’s plays under a pseudonym. Mark Twain believed it. So did Nathaniel Hawthorne. Was there proof? Had Bacon left a hidden signature?

glance, to be in cipher at all. These are still sound principles today. His insight was that all letters of the alphabet can be represented with only two letters, if the two letters are combined in different permutations of five-letter blocks. The letters i and j, and u and v, were interchangeable in Bacon’s time, so, choosing a and b for the two letters that represent all the rest, the new alphabet looks like this:

computers, and Morse code as well. In all of these systems, just two symbols, arranged in different combinations, can stand for many others. Binary code uses 0s and 1s, Morse code dots and dashes. Francis Bacon discovered the basic principle in 1623. Crucially

Bacon suggested creating a “bi-formed alphabet” to overcome this problem—an alphabet with two slightly different versions of each letter, an a-form and a b-form. For example, an italic letter might be the a-form, and a normal, “roman” letter the b-form. A string of text like knowledge

This was the heart of Mrs. Gallup’s method. She scoured photo enlargements of pages from Shakespeare’s First Folio and other Elizabethan books, looking for minute differences in the shapes of letterforms to discover the “biformed alphabet” she believed Bacon had planted in the text—the two alphabets with letters of different shapes. Then she drew charts of the a-form letters and the b-form letters. Then she went back through the original texts of the old books and compared each letter to the drawings of the letters on her charts, deciding if a letter was an a-form or a b-form. After classifying five letters in this manner, she was able to check Bacon’s key (aaaaa=A, aaaab=B, aaaba=C) and write one letter of the final message. And that was when she found the secrets that troubled her Christian